When Swedish aristocrat and gentleman, Per Kristav, needed to properly accessorize with his Penny Farthing bicycle, he turned to 3D printing to create the accessory every proper gentleman should have, a bowler hat styled bicycle helmet.

To achieve both style and safety, he used an existing low profile bicycle helmet, and created a 3D printed bowler dome to clip over the top of it, and used a felt brim from an existing bowler hat.

The process started with a 3D scan of his existing low-prifile bicycle helmet, using a 3D Systems Sense scanner, and a CAD model of the bowler hat shape he was after, created in Solidworks. The 2 CAD models were then combined, using Materialse Magics software, and the 3D scan file was subtracted from the CAD file, leaving a 3D model of the bowler hat that was perfectly mated with the bicycle helmet.

The bowler helmet was then created using selective laser sintering (SLS) on an EOS Formiga P110 machine, and glued onto the hlmet, to which the brim from a real bowler hat had already been fitted. This was done at the Lund University Idea 2 Product Lab.